- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
- Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 09:14:16 -0700
- To: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- CC: "www-archive@w3.org" <www-archive@w3.org>
> The httpRange-14 rule can be reinterpreted: If you make an RDF theory > of HTTP or of some 200-yielding HTTP resource, I don't understand the category of "200-yielding HTTP resource" in terms of the temporal behavior. There are resources which are identified by URIs, and there are HTTP servers that respond to requests. Some requests will get a 200 response and some requests will get some other response, or no response at all, or will fail to open a TCP connection or other behavior will be evidenced, and the behavior varies over time. I don't understand how "200-yielding" is used as a category distinction. Some URIs have never produced a 200 in the past but might in the future. Others have consistently produced 200 responses in the past, but might stop any minute now. ("duri" provides a way of at least fixing the temporal behavior if you want to talk about the 'expected operational behavior' at a point in time. My view is that all web servers had a time of initial operation, and have (or will have) a time when they cease to function, and so temporal variance of operational behavior is a serious problem for assertions made about time-independent concepts.) > please try to put > the RDF referent of the URI in classes that are fairly closely tied to the way > HTTP is used - e.g. documents, web pages, REST resources, web services, > and so on. What does it mean to "put the RDF reference of the URI in classes"? If you have an assertion expressed in RDF using a URI, how do you "put the RDF reference" in a class? There's a model in which an assertion written in terms of RDF and URIs is mapped to an assertion about the real world. Is your request ("please try") in the context of "when constructing the model"? I think I understand what you're asking if it's in terms of constructing a model, but I’m less sure what's involved in constructing a model. I like the idea that a "model" is (abstractly) the way in which you map the identifiers in a language to concepts or entities in the real world, but I can't imagine how one would "write down" a model, since the only languages we have for writing anything down require a model themselves to understand them. > Make "identification" under HTTP as close as you can to > "identification" in a model of your RDF theory. HTTP doesn't have a theory of "identification" -- at least "identification" was not a topic of the HTTP working group. httpRange might be proposing a model of "identification", and then proposing that RDF model makers use it? Which I suppose is useful to those thinking about using RDF and making RDF models? > If we could relate HTTP to RDF, this could set an example for relating > other protocol pairs, and if the approach became methodical, we might > be able to make suggestions about some general theory of the > (recommended) meanings of URIs - identifying equivalences, types, and > relations in one domain and showing how they correspond to > equivalences, types, and relations in another. > Personally I think HTTP/RDF is the only case worth pursuing, and > it should be useful to limit the hunt to this one quarry. I don't understand your optimism that any possible relationship between the HTTP protocol and the RDF representation system would be useful enough in general to be worth pursuing. I don't think there's any generic model of http URIs that can serve to give RDF the representational power it needs to make assertions about anything other than web servers and how they behavior. ("tdb" and HTTP URIs might be used with such a model to allow assertions about other things, of course, at the cost of the extra syntax necessary.) > Whether anyone else will like this, I'm not sure - certainly the semantic web > view is different from the above, since it thinks the world is just > one big happy > ontology. I don't buy that. (RDF != semantic web) I don't think the world is "just one big happy ontology", but I'm not sure I've seen anyone stand up directly for that point of view -- when pushed on it, most seem to think that someone else made that assumption when RDF was designed, and they're happy that someone else has figured this out. So I think it's a disconnect, not a difference of opinion. Larry
Received on Saturday, 14 March 2009 16:15:11 UTC